Haunted by Data

Data pipelines take on an institutional life of their own. It doesn't really help that people speak about “the data driven business” like they’re talking about “the Christ centered life” in these almost religious tones of fervor.

Great counterpoints to the religion of data.

The promise you’re told is that enough data is going to lead you to insight.

I worry the reason we haven't learned from the fiasco of the 60's, the systems analysis, the fetishizing of data, is because after all it's only anecdoteal. There's only the one data point.

Talking about Erroom’s law, which is Moore's law but backwards for the drug industry (the amount of money 2 cents worth of research could've bought you in the 50’s costs you 1 dollar today, and its exponentially increasing in cost).

The basic fact is that a chain-smoking chemist just randomly shooting compounds into mice is a more cost-effective way to discover drugs than an entire genomics data set. That is a bizarre result.

Speaking about this relationship where you measure the world and then make judgements. Then humans enter the world, see what you're modeling and measuring, and adapt to get around your measurements. So you take into account their cheats and then update your rules.

Notice what you've started to do. Instead of just measuring the world, you're now in this adversarial relationship with another human being and you've introduced issues of power and agency and control that weren't there before. You thought you were getting a better idea of what is happening in the reality, but you've actually just introduced an additional layer between yourself and reality. This kind of thing happens over and over again.